Nice video Irina, Sharon, Jarra, and Rebecca.  The Makerspace looks great.  I am curious if objects made within the Makerspace are tested outside the Makerspace?  For example, if students make a Doodle Bot, is there an opportunity to test it based on some variables (area covered, distance travelled, etc.) afterwards?  Also, do you support iterations to designs and how?  Thank you!

Thank your Dermot for your support of our work. My fourth grade class visited the MakerSpace on a class trip.  At The MakerSpace my students worked in groups to build tipping bucket examples.  They draw their models and decide where to place the holes in their buckets in order to make the bucket example tip.   If their examples failed, they were given an opportunity to redesign and retry the experiment.  In class, they continued experimenting and redesigning.  My goal is that they will gain experience and confidence to take the project idea and expand on it to solve an environmental problem.

Great Job Jarra. It was nice to see our groups  DoodleBot video in action!  My students also continued to explore their Doodle-Bots design in the classroom. The class changed their design with a variety of materials and then show cased their work. It was wonderful to see my students collaborate their ideas and troubleshoot new materials to create Doodle Bots with a different function. 

Dear Kristen,

Thank you for your interest. One of our goals is to help teachers to bring making to their own classroom. We hope to gather these lessons and we are waiting for our college to setup a website for us (our college has transitioned to new website this past year and it took 3 years to do, so we do not yet have our own place on the website). When all these logistics are resolved, we hope to provide access to these resources.

In order to measure success, we are collecting STEM attitudes surveys from the students in our MTFs' classrooms. We also collect science grades for 1st and 4th marking periods. Our qualitative data include curriculum materials developed by MTFs and we have short videos from their classrooms. 

Dear Rachel, thank you for watching our video. I am going to answer part of your question and leave it up to my co-presenters to answer teacher-specific part. 

Last year during our first year of the program we developed and taught graduate course "Science experiment design in elementary school". This was a course specifically designed for our cohort of Master Teaching Fellows and in this course we really focused on supporting our fellows in development of experience for their classrooms where their students can design their own science experiments. Our fellows started with short activities where students would be provided a problem or a question, and would develop their own procedures to answer questions/solve problems with available materials. That was introductory steps to making in the classroom and we primarily focused on how to make sure this becomes part of standards-based curriculum and not just after school activity or a project that was irrelevant to the curriculum. Makerspace projects were developed in this course with support from our faculty as well as through discussions and collaboration among the MTFs. This year our MTFs are implementing this projects with their students, and I would like to let them share how they made connections to their curriculum.

Thank you for your interest!

Hi Rachel! In order to position our makerspace visits within our units, we had to first consider what content the students had to learn before being able to apply their knowledge as makers. For example, in our first grade class we were focused on standard 1-LS1-1, in which students had to use materials to design a solution to a human problem by mimicking how plants and/or animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs. After we taught a number of lessons where students explored different types survival structures, we were able to bring our students to the makerspace to apply their knowledge to a human problem. Before teaching the unit, we also had to plan it out on the calendar so we could schedule the trip appropriately.

Hello Rachell,

Thank your for your response to our video.  I my case, one of the standards I focused on was standard 4-PS3-2, Make observations to provide evidence that energy is conserved as it is transferred and or converted from one form to another.  I started the unit with first visiting The MakerSpace.  I shared my lesson plan and prototype with the Educational Director at the MakerSpace and she helped me to plan for my class trip.  After our trip, my students worked on their redesign, and the subsequent lessons which included observing and connecting their knowledge of energy conversions.  

Thanks for your encouraging comments, Waveney! We completely agree that this type of learning helps students develop their imaginations and broaden their horizons. Thanks for watching!

Thank you Waveney for sharing, I am sure that you must be very proud of your son's growth and development as a result of his STEM experience.  I agree, STEM education gives our students an opportunity to take risks with their imagined ideas.  

Dear Cynthia, we are also using UbD as framework for our instructional unit design. MTFs engaged in unit planning using UbD during our first graduate course I described above. This year year we are using UbD framework to support instructional planning in connection to the second graduate course "Big Ideas of Science" and in year 3 we are focusing on curriculum unpacking and instructional planning again using UbD. So far after 2 years we see significant shifts in teacher's practice towards inquiry-based curriculum, towards giving students more freedom to ask their own questions, to design their own procedures, and to adjust their designs. We are using Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) for assessment and we have external observer coming to the classrooms to observe science teaching. Our analysis shows significant improvement in MTFs abilities to design & implement inquiry-based lessons.

Staten Island Makerspace is our partner and we plan that in years 4-5 our MTFs will be ready to lead workshops for their peers at Makerspace to learn how to utilize their resources to support science teaching. We are not looking at this as extra-curricular, but our whole focus is to find ways to integrate that into standards-based curriculum. We are also looking at ways teachers can use making or even setup Makerspace in their own classrooms. 

Dear Euisuk, thank you for checking out our project! You raise very good question. Making is a natural way for young children to learn. Elementary school teachers are generalists who are prepared to teach every subject, so bringing making into the classroom can support interdisciplinary approach. What is difficult - the structure of traditional schooling that breaks natural integration of knowledge into separate disciplines. While this could be appropriate for secondary school in order to study specific disciplines in depth, in elementary school children need to learn the big picture of the world around them, and this learning should be by doing. Maker movement can provide that environment within the school. Professionals, like engineers, can collaborate with teachers to support each other to help kids to solve problems.